The pandemic era was indeed an eye-opener, throwing light on the need to protect our health at all costs. From crumbling bed capacity to sky-high medical bills, the pandemic made it one of the most difficult times to fall sick. On the bright side, people became more aware of the need to equip themselves with the right financial assistance channels, should a similar event happen in the future. Despite taking a huge blow during the pandemic, the insurance sector has major growth potential in the post-pandemic era.
However, with business growth, insurers will need to find new and innovative ways to deal with their biggest challenge – ensuring superior customer service.
In the wake of increased digitization and consumers becoming more tech-savvy, insurance companies must find ways to tackle their drawbacks and instill confidence in every customer interaction.
Before investing in solutions, insurers must identify their fundamental customer service shortcomings. That said, lessons and experiences from a distant past may not be the right way to retrospect about their present customer service strategies.
The lingering impact of the pandemic, combined with the overwhelming push for digital interactions creates new areas where customer service needs a paradigm shift in its execution.
Let us explore the top 3 factors that insurance companies need to address in their customer service today:
Enabling self-service
Studies reveal that 88% of all consumers in the US expect brands to offer a self-service support portal for their needs. With increased smartphone penetration and awareness about internet-based services, a good portion of customers wishes to have their support queries addressed via self-service. Many of them do not even require a human customer agent to respond to them.
For insurers, this means that they need to build a supportive ecosystem that can deep-dive into their core customer data, pull out the most tailored insights and leverage the insight to respond to customer concerns or queries on self-service portals. Moreover, there is an additional need to cater to the self-service customer service needs of customers who may approach the insurer from several different channels like email, chat, telephone IVR, and so on. They may also raise requests from a range of devices like smartphones, laptops, Tablet PC, etc. Chatbots are also in focus as a way to guide customer interactions and bring structure to the support interactions.
Automate to eliminate process delays
Being one of the most regulated industries worldwide, insurers deal with tons of processes and policy frameworks for every category of insurance product offering. While detailed and onerous processes help in compliance, they sometimes hurt service delivery considerably when customers reach out in challenging times.
Process delays can derail the expectations of customers and can lead to situations where they are cut off from financial assistance at crucial times for example a delayed health insurance claim processing. The delays occur not just because of the number of processes involved, but also the inefficient execution framework of processes. Many insurers rely on manual paperwork to transition between processes for a single claim. This can consume time and effort considerably. Additionally, it creates a huge gap in customer experience when claimants try to reach out to customer support to get information on their claims. This is the scenario in which insurance companies are turning to automation. Robotic Process Automation can help address repetitive manual processes become faster, more accurate, and easy. Intelligent automation can help make other business workflows more intuitive, seamless, data-driven, and efficient. Customer queries can be resolved quickly and service levels can improve.
Enhance information availability
Information availability and transparency are key to delivering exceptional customer service irrespective of channel. However, insurance companies often leverage multiple disparate or legacy systems that do not offer seamless interconnectivity. As a result, they offer poor information visibility. This can hurt customer engagement as query responses can slow down or incorrect information may be delivered.
Elements of personalization and targeted engagement strategies can be deployed to win over customers across touchpoints. But to do so, the first step is to establish a uniform and single source of truth for information at a personalized level. In the future, when newer business systems are connected to the insurer’s ecosystem, they need to be accommodated seamlessly as well to ensure omnichannel information consistency. Data management and data governance strategies will be crucial as data quality comes into focus.
To move ahead in these changing times, insurance companies need to onboard the most apt digital solutions that enable them to serve their customers better. For example, a self-service portal integrated with an AI chatbot can help resolve the first major challenge we covered. Customers would be able to view the progress status of their claims, seek additional information, update or upload supporting documents, etc. in a completely digital and self-service initiative. On the operational side, intelligent digital solutions can automate compliance checks, accelerate validation and verification of claims, and settle accounts without ever involving a single human agent.
Established insurance players also need to fight off competition from new generation insurtech companies who have superior digital capabilities to draw market share. For this, they must digitally transform inefficient processes. Obviously, planning, executing, and managing the digital transformation initiative can be daunting for insurers. This is where Trinus can make a difference. Get in touch with us to explore our wide range of digital solutions that can guarantee maximum ROI for insurance companies.